The older I get, the more I discover that there is one thing, and one thing only, that makes sense. Christ, and him crucified. Christ on the cross is one of the most baffling, counterintuitive, and sometimes even seemingly perverse events which has ever been presented to the human mind, and certainly, as wonderful and promising of life as it was to me when I first became a Christian, that was neverthless how I saw, and have seen it since – as baffling – a beautiful but inexplicable mystery.
Jesus Christ crucified for me is still a mystery. One I will never solve. But in a perverse, odd way, it is also becoming, more and more certainly, the only thing that makes sense to me in this world we’re living in. The world’s a mess – a beautiful disaster – a puzzlement to all of us who have eyes to see and ears to her its simultaneous wonder and contradiction, its disorder and lack of definition or clear-cut patterns or purpose, the sense that haunts us of being adrift, somehow, as human beings. Add on to that the contradictions of the Bible itself, its occasional opaqueness, its refusal to deliver up to us either God in whole person or the truth complete and verified, its paraphernalia of theological and historical traditions and superimposed human beliefs, collected over centuries, and it is no wonder that people in general, and intellectual Christians in particular, have trouble grappling with the Bible as either truth at all on the one hand, or complete truth on the other. Which leads to either rejecting it out of hand or continuing to cling to it but living the rest of your life in uneasy awareness of its inherent difficulties and fear that it does not and cannot, when it comes down to it, answer all of life’s questions, much less the most profound matters of human existence. Many Christians are able to accept at least part of the Bible – and so that is what they end up clinging to, shutting their eyes to all other things. Either that or they give up in laziness or fear or despair and put the Bible aside entirely, too afraid to pursue it to find out its truth or lack thereof. It is, often, not the Bible itself which people struggle with. It’s the Bible as a whole – the idea of the Bible as a complete, perfection-approaching system of beliefs, the Bible as both doctrine and faith and history, both the Old Testament and the New in a seamless, complete whole, making up a unified worldview which should carry the individual through all of life’s trials and questions, as well as providing an answer to more existential, theoretical, and philosophical concerns.
To this recurring question, I have no specific answer at this point in my life – it’s something that I’m grappling with even now, and will be for some time, to one extent or another, even as friends confront it in a more head-on fashion – but what I do know – what I cannot escape from – is the fact that I have tested Christianity against life and what it contains over the past two years at college(I don’t consider myself, in many ways, to have started really living until I got to college) – and have found it to ring true. There’s a purity and a security to it, to the heart of it, the core of what Christianity is, that stand solid and clear in the midst of life’s confusion and misery, joy and happiness. It resonates – how and why I don’t know – but it resonates, inescapably, with the deep clear sound of a bell, and with the almost daunting firmness of Truth. It’s not a loud and spreading resonance, most of the time - but it exists, vivid and alive, however seemingly small or quiet, whenever I turn around – I have only to look and it’s there. Christ and him crucified, I remember in random moments of success or failure or simply life – and in that moment the truth of it drowns everything else out. I may be uncertain about everything else in the Bible – everything else that spreads in a circle out from this central fact, this imminent truth - but this – this is fact. This is existence. Christ died for my sins. That’s all I know. (And for the sins of all his other people). As important and necessary as all the other truths of the Bible are – and as necessary to sustain true Christian life – it is Christ’s death which alone holds enough power within itself to keep pulling me back to the Bible, drawing me back to faith, conviction, and belief – and, sometimes reluctantly, obedience – no matter what else. Because I’ve lived enough to know that I have found nothing else that feels and resonates so deeply of the Truth. And when you find it, you must respond. And you must live by it.
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